Bright forecast for baseball at Temple

Maybe it really is always sunny in Philadelphia.

Penn has had a winning record on its annual season-opening spring break trip to Florida just once in six years under coach John Cole, including a 3-6 start to their 2011 campaign. The good news for the Red and Blue is that they return to Philadelphia to play Temple Tuesday, a team that has not beaten Penn since 2006.

Penn traditionally has success coming out of spring break, going 14-6 in its first four games after the break in the last five seasons. Last year, after a poor start in the Sunshine State, Penn kicked off a five-game winning streak by exploding against Temple by a 12-6 margin.

Although the Quakers usually trump the Owls (8-5), Temple’s offense is averaging 10 runs per game and will make it tougher for Penn to have another day at the beach at Skip Wilson Field.

“They’re a very upperclassman-dominated team, very athletic and they are scoring a lot of runs,” Cole said. “We’re going to have to do a good job of keeping their lead man off base and prevent them from getting into their offense.”

But Penn will bring some offensive firepower of its own. Senior Jeremy Maas is batting .371 after making first-team All-Ivy in 2010 and freshman Brandon Engelhardt has started his Penn career with a smash, collecting 13 hits and 8 RBI in his first nine collegiate games.

“Brandon is a go guy, he runs very well,” Cole said. “I like the way he pushes the game, and he’s a fighter, and that’s the kind of kid I like here at Penn. He’s definitely a catalyst for us.”

That offense will have to come earlier in games, though, for Penn to start picking up wins again. In three of the last five games, the Quakers scored no more than one run heading into the sixth inning, and the team recently failed in late comeback attempts against both Rollins and Georgetown.

“We’re getting behind early and scratching and crawling back into games,” Cole said. “We’ve got to do a better job of jumping out to a lead and not playing catch-up.”

Senior co-captain Will Davis will have to catch up on his own offense as well. Davis is coming off a 2010 campaign in which he tied Penn’s single-season home run record of 12, but he had just five hits and two RBI in nine games on the team’s 2011 Florida run. Last year, he racked up six hits and five RBI in just seven games in Florida.

“Will’s a tremendous player,” Cole said. “We’re going to need him to get going. He struggled on the trip, but once he gets rolling, he’ll really pick us up.”

Now that they’re out of the Florida sun, Tuesday’s matchup with Temple— which was moved up a day due to rain in Wednesday’s forecast — would seem to be just the right time for Davis and the rest of the Quakers to begin shining on their own.

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